A Closer Look at the DJI Inspire 2 – 25min RAW Airtime and Faster Data Offload

by Sebastian WöberNovember 17^th, 2016

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The unveiling of the DJI Inspire 2 yesterday took us all by surprise. This new professional camera drone offers a plethora of features and impressive specs. At Inter BEE 2016 in Japan we had a chance to look at the new  DJI Inspire 2, and found out a few more tidbits like information regarding the improved RAW offload speed.

In a nutshell, the DJI Inspire 2 offers a 5K RAW camera that also includes Apple ProRes and H.265 codecs, obstacle detection, an additional front-facing camera for navigation, an interchangeable lens system, higher speeds, redundant systems, increased flight time and more.

Taketoshi Kumada from DJI Japan, an experienced Inspire 1 user, had the chance to fly with the new drone, and what seems to have impressed him most is the overall more advanced flying experience with the DJI Inspire 2. In comparison, he says the new drone now really stays in the air with its new vision positioning system. Kumada could only use the Inspire 2 indoors, but he describes the experience as fantastic.

Interesting for many will probably be the battery flight times he reports about. As I can confirm, the Inspire 1 with the Zenmuse X5R RAW camera had an air time of a mere 10-12 minutes on a single charge. In comparison, Kumada claims, that same Zenmuse X5S RAW camera on the new Inspire 2 gets you 25 minutes in the air. That’s impressive.

Another very important piece of information for me as a shooter is the offload time Kumada talked about. This is still one of the main problems on the DJI inspire 1 RAW: offloading a full 512gb magazine could take up to 5 hours, and the lack of an option to delete individual clips meant you were sometimes stuck offloading for hours until you could resume flying. It seems like this issue has been resolved with the introduction of the onboard CineCore 2.0 system that stores all files in a readable format on the SSD and lets you use them like any other external hard drive.

I’m yet to find anything I don’t like about this drone, besides the fact that a failsafe algorithm for single propeller damage is obviously missing on this quadcopter design. Other than that, I’m impatiently waiting to test this cinema camera / drone marvel soon.

The DJI Inspire 2 is available for pre-order now. The basic version will cost around $3600, while the Zenmuse X5S (RAW) version will set you back by about $6,000.